The premise of this post is flawed. Because it’s pretty clear that the Academy doesn’t want to fix the Oscars, isn’t it? It wants them to run for three hours and 52 minutes. It wants them to be dull and self-indulgent. And it wants you to shut up and sit there and remember how much you love the movies, dammit, before rushing out the next day and paying $27.50 or whatever they charge for a ticket nowadays to see one of the winning pictures.
But let’s pretend, shall we? After all, the how-to-fix-Oscar postmortem is as hallowed a tradition as the death reel and the ceremonial waxing of Jack Nicholson’s forehead. Herewith, a few lessons to take (or not) from last night’s fiasco:
1. Yes, It’s About You. But It’s Not For You. This is really the rule from which all others follow. All the crap about Oscar night being “a celebration of people who make movie magic” goes out the window when you claim a night of network primetime. What the Academy wants to celebrate, or what makes the crowd of movie folk feel stroked is irrelevant. No one at home wants to hear the President of the Academy speak about anything. We don’t like the clip reels. And when you’re getting played off in mid-speech? We’re cheering for the orchestra.
2. Don’t Try to Make People Love the Movies. Try to Make People Like the Movies. Too much of the Oscar show, from the speeches to the honorary awards to the clip reels, is shot through a rose-colored lens, full of corny sentiments about how the movies express our deepest emotions and reveal the human struggle and chronicle the history of our nation and world. This probably appeals to movie-industry people, and probably Leonard Maltin, but to the folks at home it just makes the movies seem incredibly boring. You want to make a better world? Just make sure Spiderman 3 doesn’t suck, and let us worry about the rest.
3. Stop Telling Us How Wonderful You Are. There was an especially high sanctimony quotient at this year’s Oscars because of the award parade for Al Gore, but there seems to be a recurring belief that people will see more movies if they just realized how caring, generous, humanitarian, committed this group of people is, as they sit wearing enough jewelry to erase Africa’s debt. The crowing about the “green” Oscars, the humanitarian awards–you must have to do a lot of yoga to pat yourself on the back that well.
4. It’s Not the Tonys. Seriously, dudes–Pilobolus? What, was Mummenschanz already booked?
5. Fewer Oscars in the Oscars. I joked about this in the liveblog last night, but what Oscar really probably needs is a radical Oscar-ectomy. In the digital-cable era, fewer and fewer people are willing to sit through two hours of filler to get to the awards they actually care about. For the art directors, sound editors and so forth–hey, I’m sure there’s a wonderful home on E! network or something. Should people care about the hard-working professionals who make the movies possible? Sure. They should also care about African wars that don’t involve Leonardo DiCaprio. What are you gonna do?
In the end, if the Academy wants to save the Oscars, it needs to rid itself of every scrap of sentimentality and coldly, soullessly do whatever it needs to do to produce an entertaining product that will please the masses. That shouldn’t be so hard to do. Just pretend it’s a movie.